Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Inheritance is the system by which elements automatically obtain certain properties from their ancestor elements. For example if the declaration color: red; is applied to a div element, then that declaration will also apply to p elements that are within it.
Inherited properties have no specificity at all, not even zero. An inherited property is overridden by values applied to the property using the universal selector (*). This is because the universal selector has a specificity of zero.
Most of the properties that apply to the "box" of an element such as borders, margins, padding and backgrounds, are not inherited by descendants of that element.